(Picture: People in Bombay VT station grieve the loss of their loved ones. I am so angry right now that it was a painful ordeal to write a moderate post about this)
~20 people keep Mumbai in their hold for 48 hours in a country as big as India! This is not even a flash attack. It is a war!
I salute the Army and the Navy for their courage in dealing with this assault, but as attack after attack is planned and expertly executed, all we do as a nation is take up our buckets of water and our brooms and clean up the blood. No lessons learnt, no attempts made to improve our infrastructure (except for providing more security the politicians) and no clear, forward looking vision provided by anyone who we vote for.
Though the visuals of the gun battle depresses me, what brings my blood to a boil is the way the Prime Minister, within hours of the first attack, jumped and blamed our neighbor as usual. Throwing blame and passing the buck is not the same as finding a solution. The investigations may well prove their hand in someway, but mindlessly giving such statements will spit fire in an already highly inflammable multi-cultural society. We are brewing the next assault this way, and proving yet again that we are a great soft target for the terrorists irrespective of which region or religion they belong to. Before pointing fingers, where is the introspection of why our intelligence system failed to alert us of this attack (and many more before irrespective of who was in the power)? Even if there is truth in these statements, why is our home land so spineless to defend itself? Why can't we secure our borsers? This is not the first incident we have seen, and yet, there are no traces of even the most basic disaster management system in place yet.
I know this sounds like an escapist attitude, but if we live in a state where the people who rule facilitate murders in our prisons, if the leader of the nation, who is one of the most intelligent people we currently have in our political system, hides behind the sari of the party president, why should I vote? And who should I vote for?
Emotions aside, I have not lost my hope in democracy. I am just very angry. If we want to bring about change, we can. We may be a pathetic nation when it comes to how we run our country, we may be the most unruly and the most corrupt of the populations, but I still stand by my country no matter what because what is going on is not the mistake of 1 billion people but because of the incompetence of our political system and if we are truly fed up of everything and want to raise our voices, 1 billion will eventually win.